30 October 2012

One More Week Until The Election

Let it end. Soon.

In 2008, the election was exciting high drama. This time around, the campaign is serious snoozeville with extra helpings of irritation and disingenuity. Wonkish debates over how tax and public finance and regulatory proposals of candidates overpromise or wouldn't work are important, but that doesn't make them exciting.

The Tea Party zealots and birthers have retreated to their caves to make way for the country club Republicans who are out in force campaigning for Romney. The progressive idealists who walked the streets for Obama in 2008 have been replaced by triangulating pragmatists and party loyalists.

The debates were tame and both candidates have deemphasized social issues and foreign policy. Nobody but op-ed writers is talking about the influence that this election might have on the make up of the Supreme Court. Nobody has articulated a new vision for American foreign policy and anti-terrorism policies, with the distinctive elements of Obama's agenda in 2008, like a promise to shut down the prison in Guantanamo Bay unfulfilled and forgotten. The pitched battle over "Obamacare" that dominated the political discussion in the 2010 election evaporated not long after the U.S. Supreme Court declared the law to be constitutional.

Now that President Obama is running for re-election, the historic moment in which our nation elected its first African-American President is long past. Most of the people who care about the fact that Romney is a Mormon are Evangelical Christian Republicans who distrust him because of this fact.

The down ticket races, even the hard fought ones that could change the balace of power in state and federal legislative bodies, haven't been much more interesting. Most of the ads could fit any generic Republican or Democrat. Most of the ads that aren't, haven't been very persuasive.

If it weren't for a Republican primary fight for CU Regent involving a candidate who lied about having a graduate degree and then belittled the notion that anyone might care about that fact in a CU Regent race, this election season might have been entirely devoid of memorable political moments.